Princess Ben | 
| Author: Catherine Murdock
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 15723
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Reading Level: Young Adult
Pages: 344
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0618959718
EAN: 9780618959716
ASIN: 0618959718
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
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Product Description
Benevolence is not your typical princess and Princess Ben is certainly not your typical fairy tale. With her parents lost to unknown assassins, Princess Ben ends up under the thumb of the conniving Queen Sophia, who is intent on marrying her off to the first available "specimen of imbecilic manhood." Starved and miserable, locked in the castle's highest tower, Ben stumbles upon a mysterious enchanted room. So begins her secret education in the magical arts: mastering an obstinate flying broomstick, furtively emptying the castle pantries, setting her hair on fire . . . But Ben's private adventures are soon overwhelmed by a mortal threat facing the castle and indeed the entire country. Can Princess Ben save her kingdom from annihilation and herself from permanent enslavement?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Courtesy of Teens Read Too March 31, 2008
TeensReadToo.com (All Over the US & Canada)
23 out of 24 found this review helpful
Fans of Catherine Gilbert Murdock's previous books, Dairy Queen and its sequel, The Off Season , will be surprised and excited to discover that PRINCESS BEN is a tale in a completely different vein, yet equally enjoyable. This fantasy novel with fairy tale leanings is told by Princess Benevolence, who finds herself forced into becoming a "proper" princess after years of escaping the Queen's notice when the King is killed and his brother -- her father -- disappears.
At first Ben wants nothing more than to thwart Queen Sophia's every attempt to turn her into a lady, with the right manners and figure. She stumbles through dance classes, sneaks extra food whenever she can, and avoids all thought of her new position as heir to the throne. Locked during the night in a tower room, she finds a much more interesting way of passing the time when a secret passage leads her to a room of sorcery. Soon Ben is spending all her time learning spells, and half-sleeping through her days of lessons.
Ben's newfound contentment is disrupted when the threat of war looms. Thrown out into the world by the magical forces she still cannot completely control, she learns that there is some use for the skills the Queen tried to teach her after all. It will take all of her courage and determination to survive this challenge and become a true ruler.
Ben is a spirited narrator, and readers will love every minute they spend with her, from her somewhat spoiled beginnings to her later maturity. The story has enough twists to keep readers on their toes, and nothing and no one is quite what they first seem. The romance feels a little rushed, but it isn't the focus of the novel. This is really a story about a girl growing up and coming into her own in a strange and difficult world, and it will touch readers of all ages and situations.
Reviewed by: Lynn Crow
 Witty and Elegant April 27, 2008
Monica Edinger
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
I've read, loved, studied, and taught fairy tales all my life. Every three years I co-teach a graduate school fairy tale course and, since 1990, I've been doing a Cinderella unit with my fourth graders. So I'm always interested in new versions of these old tales as well as original ones. At the same time, because many of these come up short for me, I am a wary reader of them, especially those featuring feisty oppositional heroines who are too often pallid cousins of Gail Carson Levine's Ella and Patricia Wrede's Cimorene. So I was both curious and dubious as I started reading Catherine Murdock's Princess Ben. And here I am, after finishing it last night, having enjoyed it sufficiently to want to write about it at length.
So getting to the book itself, what was it that I liked so much? First of all, I was captivated immediately by the mannered writing style and voice. Murdock has really pulled off that old-fashioned first-person epistolary style and voice; it is very nicely done indeed. At first I was very conscious of this as I read (in a good way -- I was simply enjoying her sentences and vocabulary) , but once I got into the plot I stopped paying attention; I'm guessing she sustained it all the way through. For the last few years I've been listening to a lot of Dickens, Collins, and now Eliot so I'm very conscious of this old-fashioned style and it grates on me when writers try it unsuccessfully. So bravo to Murdock for pulling it off.
The characters are all very complex -- no one is totally bad or totally good; a very nice way of deepening and complicating the usual good/bad cast of characters in traditional fairy tales. I began thinking they would be stock versions or variations or opposites of the traditional types and enjoyed the way every single one of them turned out to be more nuanced than I originally thought they were. My main quibble would be with Ben's parents. They are left as single-dimensional ghosts of her memory and perhaps that is as it should be, given her circumstances, but I did feel that I wanted to know more about them, especially her mother. For a while I did wonder about Ben's gluttony, thinking Murdock was going for a large-princesses-are-lovable-too. But she went a different and original direction that I found worthwhile (and I'm not usual one for psychological meanings, but this was interesting enough for me to feel okay with it).
The plot is captivating, engaging, and kept me reading and guessing. If I were on an award committee this year I would want to consider harder the climax of the story and whether it is a bit out-of-nowhere. (Won't say more for fear of spoilage.) But since I'm not, I'll just leave it as is. It worked just fine for me.
So, all in all, a very elegantly written and satisfying literary fairy tale.
A change of pace and surprises galore March 26, 2008
Sarah Miller (Michigan)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
At first I was a little worried Princess Ben might turn out to be just another feisty princess story. All the ingredients are there: unconventional princess, arrogant prince, mean queen, locked tower, fire-breathing dragon, girl-disguised-in-boy's-clothing, magical prophecies - you know the drill. Fortunately this story kept me on my toes. Catherine Gilbert Murdock manages to take all the familiar fairy tale elements and turn them on their head.
Oh, and the voice! Ben has sardonically appealing wit, done in a style that sounds like it was written with a quill pen on parchment. She even sent me to the dictionary a time or two.
Finally, might I just add for the record that I LOVE it when an author does something completely different than what she's done before, and does it well?
 Ella Enchanted Still Reigns July 20, 2008
Jeremi Johnson (Happy Valley, UT)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
In the author's attempt at eloquence, she uses such unnecessary flowery words, which painted no pictures or brought to mind no feelings. It was simply wordy for the sake of wordiness, and felt like the author had turned to her thesaurus at every sentence to see what extravagant turn of phrase she could create next.
Because it is a coming of age tale, at the beginning the main character is not likable in the least. But by the end, she is not lovable, either.
With a constant focus on food and her large weight, she suddenly has the relization that she's been eating for comfort, and not for sustenance. She instantly changes her ways, and food isn't mentioned again. Ridiculous. Eating disorders are never so easily conquered, and are perhaps too complicated a subject to be dissected in a book so short.
The love story element was under-developed, and I felt that I cared little for either Ben or her Prince.
The cute things I did appreciate, though, were the references made to fairy tales. The girl trades some "magic beans" for a cow, loses her shoe after a ball (by throwing it angrily at the prince), is stuck in a tall tower, and is laid under a spell to sleep.
If the author had used fewer words trying to sound intelligent, and more words fleshing out her characters, I might have loved this book. As it was, I didn't hate it. But I barely liked it.
Rated G. No parental guidence necessary for this one.
The Compulsive Reader's Reviews April 5, 2008
The Compulsive Reader (Big Rapids, MI, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Move over, Gail Carson Levine! For all of you who loved, obsessed, or even just liked Ella Enchanted, Princess Ben is for you. Ben (short for Benevolence) is in quite a predicament. Her parents and the king killed by assassins from a neighboring country, she finds herself heir apparent, and under the tutelage of her aunt, Queen Sophia, whose harsh ways quickly ensure that this princess would rather be the lowliest scullery maid than learn to be queen. But when she finds herself locked in the highest tower of the castle in true fairy tale fashion, she is amazed by the discovery a hidden magical room. There she learns spells from a mysterious spellbook while the castle sleeps. But Ben will have to learn more than magic if she's to ever escape from aunt's clutches and keep her country from being overrun by the very people that conspired in her parents' murders.
This was such a fun read. Ben's dilemmas, while set in rather mystical settings, are such that you can relate to. Never dull, she is an engaging narrator who weaves a subtle enchantment on the reader. Princess Ben is adventurous, romantic, entertaining, and most of all, a humorous story about growing up that anyone of any age will not help but love.
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